Thanks a lot for open sourcing Color Picker Pro, I think it's an awesome utility.
As for the calculator, it nice to see a different approach to a simple problem. There is, however, a line of code missing from the :buttonPressed function. For the case of kButtonSubtract, it needs to set deleteInput to YES.
Thanks for the awesome Cocoa contributions. Please, keep it up.
I think it's a great 'out of the box' topic to research.
Initially, I thought it was a couple of students who had pulled this off which lead me to, "Wow, what an awesome curriculum". However, the fact that it was a couple of scientists in research doesn't surprise me. It's still very clever and innovative.
On a side note: I'm very certain, having worked for my local school district's special education program during the summer times, that there exists many disabled students who rely on weak technologies as their way of broadcasting a message. (They cannot simply just walk into the classroom and 'text'.)
For instance, I was astonished when I saw this poor girl, in a push wheelchair, swaying back and forth a little bit, using a head button* to decide on a letter/word/picture/phrase sitting in a 5 x 10 table scrolling the x, then the y to a final destination. 2 minutes later, she said "Good Mrning". I can almost guarantee that a nice bit of software to detect a few twitches and movements is far more welcome to them.
*Head Button: Imagine the chair in the picture below with an over-sized arcade button taped to the chair's headrest. The display she used looked worse than an old Gateway of mine.
If you're interested, the field that studies these sorts of technologies is called Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC), and it is a very active area of research with a lot of great stuff going on. My department does a lot of work in this area; drop me an email if you're interested and I can point you in the direction of some reading.
You are 100% correct that current AAC solutions are often suboptimal, but one of the big challenges facing the field is that individual capabilities (both in terms of cognitive function and motor control) vary extremely widely from user to user, and so there's no such thing as a "one-size fits all" solution. Oh, and head buttons like the one you saw typically use "over-sized arcade buttons" because the user doesn't have the fine motor control needed to operate anything smaller. The idea is to give them as big and easy a target to hit as possible. There are users who, literally, are limited to twitching one of their eyebrows as their sole voluntary muscle motion, and sometimes even that is unreliable (i.e., it only twitches some of the time, or for a short period of time). In such a case, you want the button to be as easy as possible to trigger- think Fitt's law. :-)
Accelerometer-based solutions such as the one described in the article have the potential to be extremely useful; however, in the case of a user who's limited to a head button (or an elbow button, a nose switch, etc. etc.), the physical movements involved could well be too variable and irregular to be usefully decoded. That said, one of the active areas of research within the AAC world is how to build machine learning algorithms into AAC software such that an individual's system adapts over time to their patterns of use, so depending on what's going on with a particular user it might be possible to train something up... but, of course, doing this in any kind of repeatable way often ends up to be a crapshoot, as, again, users vary incredibly widely in terms of which muscles they can control and the extent to which they can do so.
Great job getting on with it. I look forward to seeing if/how you modify your design and implementation.
As I was browsing through your JS code to figure out how you end up positioning the words (vertical, horizontal or diagonal), I found the "naughtyWords" list to be hilarious. It was immediately clear to me that the developer inhabits the UK.
That actually reminds me - that stuff shouldn't even be in the client-code. And even if it should be there, methinks it ought to be scrambled somehow :)
Your deductions are indeed correct - I am in the UK - Cambridge in fact.
iTunes: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/tagdog/id495451281
Homepage: http://cloudedbox.com
My blog about it: http://cameronbriar.blogspot.com/2012/01/tagdog-for-ios.html